Night of Writing Dangerously

Beside me sat a rotund, aging man whose front teeth had all but rotted away, though his conversation and breath were much fresher than the blackened corn kernels that were all that was left of his front teeth.

The two life partners beside me were equally jolly and lacking in dental hygiene and I begin to wonder if this city doesn’t put fluoride in the water.

In contrast the four young girls across the table look like they are playing hooky from high school. And if it wasn’t Thanksgiving break that observation would be true.

I’m somewhere in between. I have a child, have long left my high school years behind (thank God), but still have all my teeth, even though some may have cancer causing metals drilled into them.

The woman to my right has a patch of dry skin between her eyebrows that sinks down to her nose. Her limp dishwater brown hair in two thin braids hanging down over her shoulders. A calling card that she is no longer a little girl but would like to remain girlish.

The verbose sixteen year old across the table speaks freely about intimate details of her life with exuberant animated gesticulations. She is a recovering Mormon, her grandfather had a seizure, the kids at school think her best friend (who is sitting next to her) is her life partner. She blabs more than I do after the two cocktails and glass of wine I have had.

The two girls sitting next to them make comments and I know they will go back to their hotel room and laugh at the other two girls for being awkward and perhaps saying too much. One of them says something that shows me how little of life she has seen, “I’ve never seen snow before.” I cringe thinking that my four year old son has seen snow, oceans, beaches, and even Disneyland at his tender young age. I wonder if he’ll ever know how much life his father and I try to breathe into him between working ten hour days and collapsing in front of the television every night. I hope when he gets older and compares notes that his childhood will match up to whatever becomes his expectations. Even though by then “do overs” are not an option.

Every person at this table is different than me. And yet we manage to banter about everything except the common thread that has brought us all there together. Writing. We are all writers but we speak nothing of it. We talk of our excitement, our fears, our shortcomings, and our bed times. But somewhere through it all we are talking because we know deep down we all have that similarity.

It’s like we are fishing. Trying to find the right bait of conversation that will bring that fish to the top. But that fish is smart and really doesn’t want to be caught. We can only be left to imagine its colors, its shape, whether or not it would win catch of the day or be thrown back to mature.

As my flight starts to descend back into my familiar territory, back into my day to day mantra of reality, I can only hope that I will bring back some of the spark from these curious people at the table with me and the hundreds more in the room whose greatest wish is to put their words to paper, have someone else read them, and have that someone believe in those words.